“So we’re stuck waiting for them to do something?” Dylan asked, his frustration evident in his voice and Anna kept hearing his words from only a few weeks before repeating in her mind. “It seems like everyone I care about is being taken away from me lately.”
Anna wanted to comfort him and was trying to think of something to say when Luca’s door blew inward and all of the hunters jumped up from their chairs, instinctively grabbing their daggers from their sheaths even though most demons they’d fought recently couldn’t be killed by a dagger or knife. The door swung on its hinges and the hunters waited breathlessly for something to happen. Footsteps on the concrete walkway outside alerted them that someone was coming.
A tall, beautiful woman filled the open doorway, her raven black hair flowing over milky white shoulders, her long sleeveless cornflower dress billowing in the late October breeze. Her eyes were so dark and filled with so much fire that Anna backed farther away from her, but the table behind her prevented her from getting too far. The woman didn’t have the same signature markings of a demon, yet she was no angel. Not a Heavenly angel anyway. And she was clearly pissed off at these hunters. Except, apparently, not all of the hunters: her eyes settled on Anna immediately and never left her.
“You,” she hissed at Anna. “You killed my husband.”
Anna gasped. She felt Colin’s surprise as who this woman must be registered with him as well.
“Lilith,” Anna whispered. She hadn’t meant to whisper. She didn’t want this demon to know she was intimidated, but it was one thing to fight a powerful fallen angel when they only wanted her dead because she wouldn’t serve Hell. Lilith was here for revenge.
Lilith stepped inside the apartment and the door slammed closed behind her. Colin moved toward Lilith to warn her not to get too close to his wife. Lilith’s eyes never moved off of Anna. “This is personal now, you bitch,” Lilith seethed.
Anna grabbed Colin’s arm and reminded him they were in a crowded apartment complex. And Lilith may not have come alone. “Your husband,” Anna retorted, “abducted our friend and transformed him into a demon against his will then tried to kill my husband and friends and me. Why should I have let him live?”
“Careful, Anna,” Colin cautioned, “demons aren’t exactly known for being rational.”
Lilith’s eyes were burning into Anna, but she couldn’t escape her penetrating glare. Dylan and Luca moved in front of Jeremy to protect him from this demon, but Lilith hadn’t come for Jeremy. She was focused only on Anna. “I won’t forget what you’ve done. When this battle begins, I look forward to destroying you, as slowly and painfully as I can.”
Colin wanted Lilith’s attention off of Anna. “First of all, how do you even know it was only Anna that killed Samael? She wasn’t out there alone. I’m always with her. And secondly, given that you’re here, I’m assuming this is another myth we can count as truth. So aren’t you one of four wives? And didn’t you leave Samael after he was castrated?” Colin didn’t actually believe all of those myths; he was just hoping to get Lilith pissed off at him so some of her anger would be diverted from Anna.
Lilith released a slow whistling breath and finally turned those coal black eyes toward Colin. “Are you trying to piss off a demoness after your wife murdered her husband? Do you really think that’s smart, Colin?”
“Just trying to get our facts straight,” Colin shrugged.
Lilith narrowed her eyes at him and pursed her blood red lips. Anna thought she may be extraordinarily beautiful but she was also one of the most frightening sort-of-demons she’d ever met. She had called herself a demoness, but unless she was able to hide her nature from them, she just didn’t feel like a demon.
“In Kabbalistic myth, you were Adam’s first wife, which would make you human,” Anna said, then realized she’d spoken aloud and wanted to back away from her again.
“She doesn’t seem that human to me,” Dylan muttered.
Lilith ignored Dylan and focused on Anna again, even though she spoke to Colin. He silently cursed the demon-woman because she wasn’t playing along with his diversions. “None of you are so stupid as to believe there were ever only two people on this planet. Whatever I am or once was is none of your business. I will either take your wife from you as my husband was taken from me, or you will avenge his death by helping me now.”
Luca let out an exasperated and startled breath, a combination of a laugh and an exclamation of surprise. “We won’t be doing anything for you, Hand of Inanna.”
Lilith’s eyes burned with a brighter rage and this time, Anna did move away from the table. Luca’s knowledge of mythology had surpassed her own, and she had no idea what he’d just told Lilith, but it had struck a nerve and she turned her rage on him. No one saw her move, but Luca was pushed back into the wall with a sickening cracking sound as the drywall splintered behind him. Anna panicked, terrified that Lilith would kill Luca now, and used her own powerful gift to throw her against the door.
Lilith grabbed onto the edge of the windowsill by the doorway and managed not to fall, but the way she glared at Anna made Colin pull the barrier around her, and Lilith must have sensed she was protected now. Anna wouldn’t give her the chance to strike her husband though. “Touch him, and I will kill you and you can vanish just like your husband,” Anna warned.
Lilith straightened herself and glowered at Anna. “I’m not an angel. You think I’ll be as easy to kill? You are still human no matter what Heaven thinks and so easy to destroy.”
Luca managed to get back on his feet and even though Anna was trying to concentrate on the demoness who wanted her and her husband dead, she could tell Luca was hurt. But he stood in front of Jeremy again anyway. The door opened behind Lilith and she glanced at it, surprised. Anna knew Colin hadn’t moved the door either; another desperate situation had taught one of the Immortals how to use this rare gift in a different way. Luca had figured out how to use it like an actual telekinetic gift and had opened the door then pushed Lilith through it. They wouldn’t be able to keep her out if she wanted to fight them now, though; Anna needed to convince her this battle would have to wait.
“You’ll get your chance to try to kill me. You’re outnumbered here anyway. None of us will be joining your army, so you can expect a war with us. And I’m looking forward to sending you back to Hell.”
Lilith parted her blood red lips and smiled at Anna, which was more terrifying than the angry scowling. Anna shivered and backed into Colin, who wrapped his arms around her. “Adriel will be so disappointed when I slaughter you, Anna. He’ll be far less disappointed when I kill your husband in front of you first.” Lilith closed the door and must have left, because the hunters stared at it silently for a long time waiting for a legion of demons and fallen angels to descend upon them, but nothing happened.
Luca finally groaned and sat down and Anna remembered he’d been thrown into a wall and hurt. “God, Luca, are you alright?” Anna asked. She knelt by his side and tried to examine him for mortal injuries, but like Colin always did, he assured her he would be fine. It was only pain and nothing he couldn’t handle, although a few beers wouldn’t hurt.
Dylan didn’t seem convinced that some demon wasn’t coming back for Jeremy so he stayed beside him, but his knowledge of religious myths wasn’t as extensive as the other Immortals and he was confused and bewildered by the whole encounter. “First things first,” he started, “who the hell is Lilith and how did you know that she was Samael’s wife? And what do they even mean they were married? We saw Samael. That dude was not a dude. Not… really. How would that even work?”
Colin wanted to help Dylan but he was fixated on a completely different aspect of Lilith’s appearance and warnings, her assertion that Adriel wanted Colin dead because Adriel wanted Anna. And Anna hadn’t missed the implication either. Luca was watching both of the O’Conners because he’d already reached the same conclusion they had: for all of Luca’s teasing earlier that morning about the nature of fallen angels and N
ephilim, there was, perhaps, some truth to it all.
Dylan sighed loudly and asked if anyone was going to answer his goddamn questions. Luca swallowed and nodded, but he was having a hard time looking away from Anna, his sister, this young woman he had adopted and loved as his own family so long ago, because there was no escaping the reality before them. What Hell wanted from Anna was far worse than anything any of them had imagined.
“There are numerous stories about Lilith and who she is, but in one of them, she was Adam’s first wife who refused to lie beneath him so she left him and eventually married Samael. In that story, he also had three other wives, but Lilith was his first. But there are a lot of stories in Kabbalistic myth, like she was created spontaneously from some divine force, but not God, and then merged with Samael.”
Anna forced her mind to disentangle itself from Colin’s because she wanted to know what Luca had told her that had pissed her off so much, but Colin was fixated on the possibility that Adriel wanted his wife. And he was angrier than ever that he hadn’t killed him in the Garden of the Gods.
Anna blinked a few times and tried to remember what she’d wanted to ask Luca. It was terribly difficult when Colin’s thoughts were so loud in her mind. He apologized and promised he’d be quieter, but he was far too disconcerted and irate and it didn’t work.
Luca helped Anna by supplying her own question. “You want to know why I called her the Hand of Inanna?”
“Yes,” Anna breathed a sigh of relief because those words simply couldn’t find their way to her mouth. The only words that seemed to want to escape at the moment were, “We need to find Adriel and kill that son of a bitch. Now.”
“Older Babylonian myths portray Lilith as a prostitute of Ishtar or Inanna. The association of Lilith with succubi dates back to Mesopotamian myths. She didn’t seem rattled by the Kabbalistic myths, so I thought I’d throw that one out there to see if anything stuck. She didn’t seem to like it, did she?” Luca explained.
Anna actually laughed and everyone except Colin stared at her, waiting to see, perhaps, if Lilith’s revenge was Anna’s insanity, but Colin just shook his head and grinned. Anna looked among Luca, Dylan and Jeremy and when they still didn’t make the connection, she threw her hands up and said, “Oh, come on! She’s the Whore of Babylon! She’s prophesied in Revelations, and her husband turns out to be the fifth angel of Revelations. She didn’t like the association not because she was actually a Babylonian goddess’s prostitute, but because you got too close to the truth. And nothing makes these demons and fallen angels squirm more than us figuring them out.”
Colin agreed with her. “Ahriman got nervous and squirmy as hell the closer we got to finding Samael and Jeremy. That’s how we knew how to find them.”
Anna smiled up at her husband, still in awe of what he’d been able to do in the Garden of the Gods. “Until you held him prisoner anyway.”
Colin just shrugged off the compliment because when they’d returned to Devil’s Thumb, all of the hunters had made such a big deal of what he and Anna had done out there. But they’d returned with an unconscious friend and had little time to talk to Luca or Andrew when they first got back. Once Jeremy woke up, he told them about Andrew’s betrayal, so they had been careful not to isolate Anna as the only one who had battled and then killed Samael. But somehow, Andrew must have known because Lilith knew who killed her husband.
Jeremy collapsed into an empty chair and buried his head in his hands. “There’s no way Andrew could have guessed it was only Anna, and we were all so careful about what we said around him. You don’t think Ahriman survived, do you?”
Dylan moved closer to Jeremy’s chair, still standing protectively over him. Anna wondered if he would ever be able to get over the fear of Jeremy being stolen from them again. It had happened to the rest of the hunters now, and Ben had been Jeremy and Dylan’s friend, too. They had saved one, only to find themselves back in the same situation.
Colin sat down at the table across from Jeremy and told him he was almost positive Ahriman didn’t survive. He felt the demon break apart and disappear, and he was pretty sure that meant it had died. Or whatever happened to them when they ceased to exist.
Jeremy lifted his head and looked at Colin, the sadness and fear in his eyes reminding Anna of the dream where she and Jas had found him alone in a windowless brown room in Stalingrad. “What if that’s the problem? What if they don’t die? Didn’t Einstein theorize something about energy and how it can’t be created or destroyed, just transformed?”
“But Lilith just accused me of killing her husband,” Anna protested. “And our own angels have admitted they can die.”
“Right,” Jeremy sighed, “but Samael was an angel, even if he did fall, it doesn’t change what he was. Ahriman was a demon. Lilith is… well, I don’t know what the hell she is, I’ve never even heard of her. Maybe we can’t kill demons?”
Anna glanced uneasily at Colin, but he didn’t know how to continue arguing with Jeremy anymore either. Somehow, Lilith had found out what happened inside that cave, and the only people who knew were inside this room with them now. And none of these hunters would betray each other. They were certain of that.
Luca put his own head in his hands and exhaled slowly. “We know people don’t cease to exist. They’re just different when their bodies die. So this is it? We can’t defeat Hell because we can’t ever get rid of these bastards?”
“God, Colin, he’s giving up hope again. We can’t let that happen. Not to Luca. He’s our mooring. Where would we be without him?”
But Colin didn’t know what to tell him. Sometimes, faith alone simply couldn’t carry them through such turbulent seas.
Chapter 6
Anna stood outside a two story brick building with thick, blurry windows and a heavy door with wrought iron handles. The sidewalk and street behind her were abandoned and a light snow was falling around her. She pulled her long coat tighter around her and pulled on the door handle to try to get inside where it might be warmer. The doors were locked. Anna knocked on the glass of the door but it was impossible to see inside. She didn’t hear anyone moving from within.
She looked down the sidewalk again and wondered if she should try another building, but for some reason, she wanted inside this one. She knocked again and pushed on the doors since pulling on the door handles hadn’t worked. The doors didn’t budge. She was about to call for Colin to come help her when she realized he wasn’t with her. She felt him nearby, but he wasn’t here, and this just confused her even more. How could he feel so close yet not be with her?
“Colin?” she called for him, but he didn’t answer her. Her stomach turned and she tasted something sour in her mouth. Was he inside this squat building? Is that why she wanted to get inside? She beat on the windows and yelled his name aloud now, but no one answered her and still, she was alone on this cold street in Stalingrad.
Stalingrad.
The word resonated in her mind and she knew it had some special meaning, and she tried to grab onto it, but it slipped away from her. Anna backed away from the building and stared at the second floor, windowless and flat. She swallowed that sour taste in her mouth.
“Colin?” she called out to him again, but she knew now he couldn’t hear her from Stalingrad. She wanted to walk around the building to look for another way in, but there were no gaps between the buildings, no way for Anna to get around to the back unless she left this street, and as she looked down the desolate street again, she noticed there didn’t appear to be any cross streets. This one just seemed to go on and on in endless miles leading to nowhere.
Anna felt inside her coat pockets and finally found her knife. She didn’t know what she could possibly use it for, but she gripped it anyway and approached the door, hoping to find some lock she could pry open. She slipped the blade of her knife between the thin space of the door and the doorjamb and was about to try to find some locking mechanism when Jas stopped her. “Anna, that doesn’t seem safe.”
“Jas,” Anna whispered her name.
Jas bent down and picked up her knife and handed it to her. “What is it with this particular dream and you being so weird?” Jas asked her. Anna just shook her head. A dream. Of course. She had to be dreaming.
Jas sighed and looked up at the building and shivered again. “I thought it couldn’t get any worse than last time. I think I was wrong. Ghosts shouldn’t be able to freeze to death, right?”
Anna just nodded. She wondered if Immortals could freeze to death though. Jas studied Anna for a few seconds then rolled her eyes and asked her if she’d been drinking again. “Drinking? No. When was I drinking?”
Jas grabbed Anna’s shoulders and turned her body to face her. “Good God, this is annoying. Ok, this is the third time we’ve ended up in Stalingrad. The first two times you were inside this building and cut off from Colin. The second time, you went upstairs, and we searched all these rooms, then found Jeremy sitting alone in one of them. That was before you freed him from Samael. Ringing a bell?”
Anna focused on Jas’s soft brown eyes and tried to remember, but something seemed so wrong here, as if something weren’t letting her remember why she was here. She told Jas that, and Jas let go of her shoulders and looked around the empty streets.
“Anna,” Jas said softly, “I think maybe I know why this place has always freaked us out. Why you can’t find Colin here.”
Anna grabbed Jas’s hand and begged her to tell her where Colin was. She was scared for him, but she wasn’t sure why.
“I’m sure Colin’s fine. Max is with him. You’re dreaming, Anna. At least, I think you are. He’s probably lying next to you in bed right now.”
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